Michael O'Sullivan

Disney’s gorgeously animated, entertainingly told fantasia Raya and the Last Dragon is a visual feast.

It's in this final chapter that the director states his message, which is handled so lightly, almost incidentally, you might miss it. But it's a profound one. For what the girls learn is that the way to get what they want -- no, need -- isn't by hoarding something, but by letting go.

Like a miniature universe made entirely of millions of tiny plastic bricks, The Lego Batman Movie looks and feels like it could only have been put together by a roomful of mad geniuses, moving in a ballet of well-choreographed creativity: It’s simultaneously epic and humble.

It plays out with all the suspense of a thriller. Assisted by acclaimed editor Walter Murch, Levinson wisely shapes the story not around the hardware, which was plagued by malfunctions and other delays, but around the people tasked with making the LHC run.

It's tasty enough, and probably good for you, but at 73 minutes, the film is hardly a very filling entree.

Microbe and Gasoline doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it just might ride four of them into your heart.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

Peace Officer piles up evidence of outrageous excess, provoking what is likely to be a response, from its audience, that is far less measured than that of its main subject.

Kennebeck may be a newcomer to feature filmmaking, but her grasp of the material is accomplished.

Modest but nonetheless devastating documentary.

Like his other films, this one takes an admittedly slender thread of an idea — one that would make a perfectly good premise for a four-minute comic sketch — and stretches it to almost the breaking point, and sometimes beyond, twisting and intertwining it with other nonsense along the way, just for the heck of it.

Though it takes place in the recent past, at a time when the Bhutanese people were still getting used to such American imports as James Bond movies and “black water” (Coca-Cola), the film has something important to say about the promise and the perils of the present.

An okay movie made nearly great by one great thing: the bravura, mercilessly watchable performance of Charlize Theron.

McKinney, a woman whose spellbinding and baffling presence - nay, performance - in Tabloid more than lives up to her recent off-screen antics.

It's great fun.

That we almost don’t question the plausibility of this oddest of odd couples is a tribute to the sensitive direction of French Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux, who wrote the relatable yet keenly observant script with Alexandre Laferrière.

Mostly The Return is about listening to great music getting made by two women representing two generations of country music — Carlile is 41 — who genuinely seem to respect each other, and who have obvious talent.

There’s plenty of food for thought here too, and Carmichael clearly hasn’t set out to trivialize a serious subject. But the film may inadvertently end up doing that, by delivering a message that can be boiled down to a platitude: Live every day as if it is your last.

Polisse is hard to watch at times, but it's also hard not to.

I remained strangely dry-eyed up to the final shot.

There’s a lot going on here — a quasi-biblical space opera, part Lawrence of Arabia and part mobster movie — and spreading it out over two movies has allowed [Villaneuve] to take his time with the story and tell it richly, and without rushing

The film, like the cheap double-scotches quaffed down by the central character, leaves a distinctly sour aftertaste that's hard to wash away the morning after.

One thoroughbred of a movie. Sleek, well-muscled and brisk, director Steven Soderbergh's newest offering delivers just about everything anyone could possibly want from filmed entertainment -- except deep thought.

The Armstrong Lie is thorough, fair and thoughtful. It may not, however, close the book on the scandal.

Never preachy, never sanctimonious nor touchy-feely.

Cousteau is a thorough if somewhat by-the-book profile of a pioneer in the field of marine ecology and an activist for better environmental stewardship.

For much of its brisk running time, It Comes at Night teeters between delicious atmosphere and almost unbearable tension.

Fiddler’s Journey aims to tell a story that delves into more than creative and technical details. Although it is also about those details.